Hi guys,
when I have problems getting new work, I spend ages going to various message boards and threads to find out whats going on. We should have one simple BOARD without threads hosted by head ET. And on this board we can simply see the status of operations.
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Gus in Melbourne Downunder

I don't know what you're visiting, but I only come here. SETI@Home hosts only a single message board.

If you're referring to the different sections (Number Crunching, Technical News, Q&A), they're here for different various reasons (BTW, they're different forums on the same message board with different topics or "threads"). The message board hosts different forums to support a diverse group of people that wish to come here to talk about various subjects.

Understand all that. Thats just it. Two many boards. So where do I go to find out why com's are differed 24 hours. I have no work units. Ta

A pedantic point: there is only one board. The board has multiple forums.

The best places to check during problems is either Technical News or Number Crunching.

It seems that the servers are fine, but an oddity is preventing them from talking to Linux machines at the moment. If you're not using Linux, then another issue may be at play here and it would help to post some of the error messages from your Messages tab.

Strange that I see "General prefs: from SETI@home (last modified 2008-10-22 "
but your times for all the lines are in april. Looks like the pc clock is set wrong or is this an old log file.
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Those messages tell you that your BOINC can't do communications with the Seti server, but that it can do communications with the internet (through pinging the reference site at www.google.com).

Usually BOINC does shorter deferrals on the retry, although I think BOINC 5.8.16 (which you are using) did the 1 day deferral. So you could try to update to a much newer BOINC and see if that fixes your problem. The latest recommended version available for Windows XP is 6.2.19. Do read the FAQ on what changes there are between the version you're using and the BOINC 6 version. There are plenty.

As for the original problem, why you can't reach Seti, there's a couple of possibilities as well:

a) The project server is down. Nothing you can do about it, except wait until itâ€™s back up. If the projectâ€™s website is available for browsing, check the front-page news or message boards for information about outages.

b) The project server is up, but your internet connection isnâ€™t reaching it. This is called a â€œblack hole serverâ€, where the line youâ€™re following goes into a server node on the Internet and doesn't come out, usually because the node is down. Updating to a newer version of BOINC might help, especially if youâ€™re still using v4.x or 5.4.x. Quitting and relaunching BOINC may refresh its routing information; failing that, try rebooting the computer.

c) The client is being blocked by a firewall or proxy, one that does allow pings through on port 80, but not much else by way of communication. Make sure BOINC has permission to go through the firewall and, if youâ€™re behind a proxy, that BOINC is set up to use the correct proxy address.
____________Jord

Hi Ageless,
I have up dated to latest version.
Here are latest messages.
Thank you for explaining things in simple terms.
I am still concerned about pinging Google, and not SETI.
I have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll shut down now and restart
computer and if it will get new work in version.

No need to be concerned about that. BOINC pings Google to check if your internet connection is adequately set up, to see if you are able to get onto the internet. It takes Google because that site is always up, whereas the Seti site can be down.

Then there are some 90+ other projects that can be run under BOINC. What if all the computers running BOINC on those projects started pinging Seti? That would be a denial of service attack on the servers here, rendering the project inoperable. Seti can do that all by themselves already, they don't need other computers for that. ;-)
____________Jord